The
ghosts that haunt the elegant poems of Berwyn Moore are
the ghosts of loss, of memory, and of the ties that bind. Dissolution of Ghosts enacts its title through
the very act of lyric art that predominates in these poems.

“Witty, gravely serious, skillfully phrased, and charged with
remarkable images and dream-like narratives, Berwyn Moore’s
poems take us on strange and surprising journeys. The mall, the zoo,
Buggs Island Lake are simple starting points for extraordinary leaps
of imagination. ‘The Decisive Moment’ tells us how a photograph
of a woman falling from a building allows Moore to ‘love her
before she hits the ground.’ If we are all falling, and we are,
Moore’s poems love us before we hit the ground. This is a triumphant
collection.”—Kelly Cherry

“In this collection of startlingly original poems, Berwyn
Moore confronts with courage and sensitivity the tremors and trials
of a life and decides to embrace them, singing all the while. These
are poems that recreate the days and nights in which we live, so that
we can better know ourselves. Afterwards, as she describes us, readers
and poet: ‘suddenly we’re all laughing—the old,
the lost, the new, the cured.’”—David Citino

“In this first book, Berwyn Moore gives us poems of remarkable
calm and clarity, brave poems that enter the cloaked underworld of
death, betrayal, and separation. As perhaps Persephone discovered,
the root of terror is within. But once the darkness is entered and
seen through, there is (the poems tell us) anchor, rest, trust, nurture,
and a return to honest touch, honest telling. At the core of these
dark, dream-like poems is the will to heal.”—Margaret
Gibson

“Berwyn Moore’s Dissolution
of Ghosts shows why readers of poetry look forward to inaugural
collections. There is often in them the splash of the world entered
at its coldest, most unforgettable point, the intersection of character
and tale which under the impress of discipline engenders what seems
a new light on the weight of the ordinary, of experience. All this
and more lies at the heart of this first book, the story of a woman
going ahead, walking on, resolute and strong.”—Dave Smith

Berwyn Moore was born in Mussoorie, India, and grew up in Colorado,
Michigan and Virginia. Her poetry has been published in The Southern
Review, Shenandoah, the Journal of the American Medical Association,
Kansas Quarterly and other journals. She has won poetry awards
from the Chester H. Jones Foundation and Negative Capability press
and a teaching award from the National Foundation for the Advancement
of the Arts. Her poem “Glass" was nominated for the Pushcart
Prize. Before studying English at the University of North Carolina
and Bowling Green State University, where she won the Devine Fellowship
Award, she worked as a photographer, a hospital pharmacy IV technician,
and a respiratory therapist at a children’s hospital. She is
an Associate Professor of English at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania,
where she lives with her husband, Robert Brooker. She has two children,
Aaron and Emma, and two stepchildren, Rachel and Ian.